The increase in distribution of media over the Internet has led to the desire for advertisers and other content providers to develop new ways of reaching potential consumers. Previously, an advertiser knew a general location of a person receiving the advertisement. For example, an advertiser in a geographically-based television market knew that the person viewing its add was in that television market. On the Internet, however, advertisers typically do not know the location of the person receiving the advertisements. Advertisers are able to take advantage of user activities monitored by servers, such as a history of search queries tracked by a search engine. These user activities may be used to formulate interests of consumers that are then used in determining appropriate advertisements. User activities, however, often depend on a current user location and are irrelevant when a user is no longer at that location. For example, if a user is visiting a certain town and searches for restaurants in that town, that search activity will be irrelevant to the user upon his or her departure and would thus be a poor determiner of which advertisements are appropriate.
Many user devices, such as telecommunication devices, have mechanisms for determining their locations. For example, many of these devices are equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) components that enable a telecommunication device to locate itself. This location information is sometimes provided to remote servers, such as third party application servers. The downside of these mechanisms, however, is the amount of power and processing they consume. Typically, user devices have limited battery power and processing means that must be conserved. Thus, use of these user device-based location mechanisms for providing servers with user locations is problematic.